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Comment by futurix | Hacker News Reader

"Google Chrome required" - sure, because current crop of web developers are too young to remember dark age of Internet Explorer domination.

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Yeah, I noticed the contradiction:

"Explore the far reaches of the world, right in your browser. "

But my browser is FireFox.

Simple fix: "Explore the far reaches of the world, right in our browser. "

I know I know stupidity beats malice .. but when I first saw that same message I thought: nice marketing stunt, well played Google

What's even more annoying about this is it requires specifically Google Chrome, I'm on Chromium on Linux, where you'd think it works, but it doesn't. It doesn't even fail nicely.

I was wondering what the hell was going on.

What web technology does this use, specifically, that prevents firefox usage? Or is it just a chrome plugin they decided not to port?

["other browsers in the near future"](https://blog.google/products/earth/welcome-home-new-google-e...), so maybe there isn't one?

I think the issues is that it uses NaCl - I assume they compiled the existing Earth engine to run on the web.

Most likely web-based Earth was launching just too early to switch from NaCl to WASM, which just shipped, and they'll port to NaCl soon.

Hasn't NaCl been abandoned? On top of the annoying browser incompatibility, this is also a pretty embarrassing case of Google's left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.

This is a rewrite, not a recompilation.

I remember when inbox launched it could be only used under chrome/chromium. Then somebody changed their user agent in firefox to chrome and magically it started working just fine. So you might want to try that.

Looks like the first hurdle is that it's relying on the deprecated document.registerElement API from an early draft of the Web Components specs, which prevents the app from booting in Firefox.

Edit: Paul Kinlan reports that Earth is using PNaCl (https://twitter.com/Paul_Kinlan/status/854351477506277378), which means it fundamentally can't run outside of Blink.

> Paul Kinlan reports that Earth is using PNaCl (https://twitter.com/Paul_Kinlan/status/854351477506277378), which means it fundamentally can't run outside of Blink.

Reminds me of the good old days of ActiveX!

Just curious on why they would use PNaCl over WASM here? Wasn't WASM on track to becoming standard for native-speeds in the browser?

Timelines. WASM just shipped. I'm sure Earth has been working on this for years.

Probably because PNaCl is available now and was available two years ago when they say they started.

Earth uses Polymer, which works cross-platform using polyfills, so that's not what's making it Chrome-only. It's NaCl.

Either the polyfills aren't being shipped or their feature detection is broken, because I get "document.registerElement is not a function" in Firefox Nightly with a spoofed UA string, and I get marginally further if I turn on our experimental native support for Web Components: http://imgur.com/a/TgnrQ

The polyfills aren't being shipped, since Earth is using NaCl which is already Chrome-only.

Polymer's polyfills don't work very well, for what it's worth. Sometimes they get confused if things don't load from the network in the order they expect and start eating up gigabytes of RAM and all your CPU...

Can somebody fix Google's code? It's just Javascript, right?

It's just Javascript, but served from Google servers. For a fix to work for other users you'd need them to use a plugin that applies it.

At some point, it's using an API to get the map data. Is there anything that prevents non-Google hosted code from using that API?

Yes, rate-limits.

PNaCl is a binary executable format.

Is Google actually using that? That's IA-32 only. It won't run on ARM. What are they running on Chromebooks?

> Is Google actually using that? That's IA-32 only. It won't run on ARM.

Incorrect, PNaCl runs on both ARM and Intel.

NaCl (without the P) had to be separately compiled for different platforms, PNaCl is portable.

I believe Inbox had major performance issues in non-Chrome browsers at launch, which was something they fixed in the weeks following its initial release. Once those were fixed, it was opened up to other browsers.

The Firefox bug was trivial to fix, but nobody at Google bothered to report it. If they had, it would have been a non-issue by the time that Inbox was released.

> "Google Chrome required" - sure, because current crop of web developers are too young to remember dark age of Internet Explorer domination.

This is the same with the new YouTube TV too. I'm not sure if it's a DRM issue or not. Especially galling if so given the controversy over HTML5 DRM content, after other browsers have decided to support it, to then roll your own solution anyway...

DRM in web browsers is anything but standard.

Edge uses PlayReady, Chrome uses Widevine, Safari uses FairPlay, etc.

As a content producer, you have to get licenses to use each of those technologies and run servers for them separately. It's anything but standard.

> This is the same with the new YouTube TV too. I'm not sure if it's a DRM issue or not.

Firefox supports the same Google Widevine DRM as Chrome, so YouTube's choice of DRM system should not be an issue.

It is unacceptable.

Erm, this product isn't done by some random web developer but google themselves... so yeah, they made another essentially proprietary website.

it honestly sucks but your phrasing puts the blame on inexperienced developers, which most certainly doesn't apply here.

You underestimate how many levels of engineering at Google are entirely populated by recent college grads. It could absolutely be unwillingness (I agree it's probably not blind ignorance) to pay attention to the lessons of the past.

> current crop of web developers are too young to remember dark age of Internet Explorer domination.

How does that happen? I'm not even 30 and I remember when IE6 was new. Does everyone burn out or move into management by 26 or what?

Programming is really a weird field in that it seems to lose a lot of its workmen just as they start maturing into the experience level that yields a productive stride in other fields.

I know some make the argument that programming is a young man's game due to the required mental acuity, but I don't really buy that. Perhaps as people get older, they become increasingly less interested in staring into the computer and seek more social forms of employment?

We've got to be losing a huge amount of productivity by seeing experienced developers drop off the map before they hit 40.

How long before we see the same notification on Google Search and Gmail?

Google already serves a degraded Google Search UI (the "heirloom" interface) to Firefox on Android. You have to spoof your UA string to get the modern UI: http://imgur.com/a/cIH7T

I respect the European to keep American tech giants on their feet.

Google is really the new evil Microsoft.

It is building it's walled gardens and enabling in monopolistic activities.

Apart from Gmail and Google I don't touch anything that Google makes in the fear that it will be half baked and will be cut the year after.

Presumably never, since that would make a serious cut into their advertising revenue, and provide quite an opening for competitors in both spaces to snap up disgruntled users.

But is it required for some open technology?

Chrome is a voluntary install, open source and keeps pushing web tech forward. 1 site using advanced features that aren't supported elsewhere is not a big deal and not comparable to IE's history.

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